In Canada, the push to promote euthanasia, or “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD), has reached the point where it is repeatedly offered to patients who are not terminally ill. A prime example of this worrying trend is the case of Father  Larry Holland , a 79-year-old priest who, while recovering from a hip fracture at Vancouver General Hospital, was offered this procedure on two separate occasions.

The first suggestion came from a doctor, who offered euthanasia as an option should his health deteriorate. Father Holland immediately rejected it, stating his complete moral objection. However, weeks later, a nurse reiterated the same proposal. The patient expressed his incomprehension at the insistence on offering euthanasia to a Catholic priest, completely disregarding both his religious beliefs and his previous refusal. For its part, the hospital’s response has been limited to justifying that healthcare professionals have a duty to inform about assisted suicide based on their own medical judgment.

Given the evidence of these practices, which pose a clear risk of coercion to the most vulnerable patients, conservative politician Garnett Genius has introduced legislation aimed at preventing such pressure. His initiative seeks to expressly prohibit federal employees from offering or recommending euthanasia to individuals who have not requested it.

This particular case is part of a grim national reality. Since its legalization a decade ago, euthanasia has been performed on approximately 100,000 people in Canada. This overwhelming figure raises serious bioethical questions involving all actors in the process, holding not only the legislators who drafted and passed the law responsible, but also all the professionals involved, from the initial case evaluation to the clinical procedure that results in the patient’s death.

The “slippery slope” of euthanasia

Initially, Bill  C-14  allowed adult Canadians in a serious and irreversible medical condition to access MAiD, with the possibility of withdrawing the request at any time and after a mandatory reflection period.

In February 2021, Law C-7 came into force, which repealed the requirement that death had to be reasonably foreseeable, so that, since then, people with chronic non-terminal illnesses or with physical or psychological suffering that is considered intolerable can request it.

In 2023 the law was reformed to include people with  mental illnesses  among those who can request euthanasia.

Bioethical assessment

Pro-euthanasia stances are seeking to expand their application with increasing intensity. The manipulation of messages that, under the guise of false compassion, present murder or suicide in patients who request it as a liberating option, spreads the culture of death alongside the abandonment of care for those who need it.

The saturation of euthanasia proposals in the media, as well as the insistence on offering it to the sick in countries where it is legalized, is contributing to an increase in the number of requests and executions, increasingly detached from unbearable suffering, incurable diseases or terminal states.

The blurred window of psychic suffering, which is difficult to assess, opens the possibility of applying euthanasia to any patient, healthy or sick, who subjectively believes that they are suffering to an unbearable degree.

In the case we are now analyzing, the offer of euthanasia was made “preventively,” that is, in case the patient’s condition worsened. It would involve including euthanasia as another option among the “therapeutic” protocols in a simple case of a hip fracture.

As we previously reported  in our Observatory, in Canada since the legalization of these practices in 2016 the state has saved 66 million dollars, a fact that may be encouraging the proposal of euthanasia to more and more patients, as opposed to the alternative of offering quality palliative care. 

These are worrying symptoms of decline in civilizations that choose to suppress the vulnerable instead of caring for them as they need.

Julio Tudela. Ester Bosch. Bioethics Observatory. Institute of Life Sciences. Catholic University of Valencia